Ramblings & ephemera
Image by Esther_G via Flickr
From Josh Olson’s “I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script” (The Village Voice: 9 September 2009):
It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you’re in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you’re dealing with someone who can’t.
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Why Picasso charged [...]
Posted on September 16th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, commonplace book, language & literature, on writing | No Comments »
From David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” (Gourmet: ):
As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, politics | No Comments »
These come from a variety of sources; just Google the law to find out more about it.
Parkinson’s Law
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
Source: Cyril Northcote Parkinson in The Economist (1955)
The Peter Principle
“In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
Source: Dr. Laurence J. Peter and [...]
Posted on June 22nd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, commonplace book, science, technology | No Comments »
photo credit: Cia de Foto
From Gene Weingarten’s “Murphy’s Law” (The Washington Post: 3 May 2009):
[My dog] Murphy has a good life, which is the least we humans can do for a dog, in return for what they give us, which is access to the sort of innocence and trust and absence of guile or [...]
Posted on May 7th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009):
Van Gogh in Arles wrote this about death:
Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why? I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, commonplace book, history, language & literature, religion | No Comments »
From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009):
What I expect will most probably happen [when I die] is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function, and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. Perhaps I [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, commonplace book, language & literature, religion, science | No Comments »
From Philip Larkin’s “Aubade“:
I work all day, and get half drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, language & literature | No Comments »
From Russell L. Ackoff & Daniel Greenberg’s Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track (2008):
A classic story illustrates very well the potential cost of placing a problem in a disciplinary box. It involves a multistoried office building in New York. Occupants began complaining about the poor elevator service provided in [...]
Posted on September 18th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, science, true stories | No Comments »
“You’ve been hoist by your own retard.”
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Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, language & literature, true stories | No Comments »
Denise & I are in the car, talking about her friend Scott E., when her cell phone rings. It’s Scott E.!
Denise: “Scott! We were just talking about you! Your ears must have been ringing!”
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Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, overheard, true stories | No Comments »
From Les Jones’s email in Bruce Schneier’s “Crypto-Gram” (15 August 2005):
Avoiding rescuers is a common reaction in people who have been lost in the woods. See Dwight McCarter’s book, “Lost,” an account of search and rescue operations in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In one chapter McCarter tells the story of two backpackers in [...]
Posted on April 15th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, weird | No Comments »
From Atul Gawande’s “Final Cut: Medical arrogance and the decline of the autopsy” (The New Yorker: 19 March 2001):
… in the nineteenth century … [some doctors] waited until burial and then robbed the graves, either personally or through accomplices, an activity that continued into the twentieth century. To deter such autopsies, some families would post [...]
Posted on April 12th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history, science, security | No Comments »
From Atul Gawande’s “Final Cut: Medical arrogance and the decline of the autopsy” (The New Yorker: 19 March 2001):
The Roman physician Antistius performed one of the earliest forensic examinations on record, in 44 B.C., on Julius Caesar, documenting twenty-three stab wounds, including a final, fatal stab to the chest.
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Posted on April 12th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history, science | No Comments »
From Nicholas Lemann’s “Paper Tiger” (The New Yorker: 4 November 2002):
Ellsberg devoted a good portion of his life to decision theory, and made quite a significant contribution for somebody so young. People are still publishing comments on his best-known idea, the so-called “Ellsberg paradox.”
The paradox arises from a series of games involving colored balls in [...]
Posted on April 12th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book | No Comments »
From Ask Yahoo (5 March 2007):
There are only so many ways to construct a story.
Writers who believe there’s only one plot argue all stories “stem from conflict.” True enough, but we’re more inclined to back the theory you mention about seven plot lines.
According to the Internet Public Library, they are:
1. [wo]man vs. [...]
Posted on July 26th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, commonplace book, language & literature, on writing, writing ideas | No Comments »
From the email archives:
On Sunday 30 May 2004 11:32 pm, Jerry Hubbard wrote:
> How is everyone? Hope the storms did not harm anyone.
My basement flooded twice, my tenant’s kitchen had water streaming in through the window frame, our backyard fence was blown down, the umbrella on our deck was blown off the deck into the [...]
Posted on November 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, true stories | Comments Off
From Erica Goode’s “Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find: They’re blind to own failings, others’ skills” (The New York Times: 18 January 2000):
Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.
On the contrary. People who do things [...]
Posted on October 7th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, science | Comments Off
From Reuters’s “Chinese fugitive leaves cave after 8 years” (5 October 2006):
A Chinese man wanted by police on gun charges has given himself up after hiding in a cave constructed at the back of his house for eight years, the official Xinhua news agency said.
The 35-year-old man from the southeastern city of Fuzhou had tunneled [...]
Posted on October 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, law, weird | Comments Off
From Reuters’s “Body found in bed 5 years after death” (4 October 2006):
Austrian authorities have discovered the body of a man who apparently died at home in bed five years ago, a Vienna newspaper reported on Wednesday.
The corpse of Franz Riedl, thought to have been in his late 80s when he died, went undetected for [...]
Posted on October 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, true stories, weird | Comments Off
From Chris Suellentrop’s “Scooby-Doo: Hey, dog! How do you do the voodoo that you do so well?” (Slate: 26 March 2004):
The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever concisely elucidated the “Scooby worldview” when the first live-action movie came out: “Kids should meddle, dogs are sweet, life is groovy, and if something scares you, you should confront it.”
Related [...]
Posted on October 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, commonplace book | Comments Off
